A How question

How does an SEO company measure link quality?

3 min read Cites 3 sources

It judges each link against one question: would this link exist if search engines did not? A link that a writer or editor chose to include because your page was useful to their readers is the kind worth having. A link placed mainly to influence rankings is not, and it may be a risk. To answer the question, a company looks at several signals together for each link: how relevant the linking page is, whether the link was earned or paid for and how it is marked, whether the linking page has a real audience, and the anchor text. Scores from SEO tools can help sort a long list, but they are the tools’ own estimates, not Google’s measure.

Why the judgment matters

Google’s guidance on links states: “Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.” A link from a page about a related subject tells Google something about yours; a link from an unrelated page placed for ranking purposes tells it much less, and Google has systems built to find the second kind.

Relevance comes from the linking page and the site around it: whether they cover a subject connected to yours, and whether the link sits in a passage where a reader would find it useful.

How the link was obtained and marked matters next. Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links gives two instructions that matter here: “Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value.” And: “We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, with the ugc value.” So a paid placement should carry the sponsored marking, and links left in comments and forums are expected to be marked as user-generated. A company counting either kind as an earned editorial link is overstating its work.

The audience of the linking page is a practical check. A page that people actually visit can send you visitors; a page on a site that exists only to publish links sends none.

Anchor text is reviewed across the whole set of links rather than one by one, looking for patterns that look engineered, such as many links using the same commercial phrase.

Google’s page on spam updates explains: “SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system.” Google improves it over time to catch new types of spam. For links, the consequence is spelled out: “This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.” A link that seems to help today because it has not yet been discounted is not a lasting asset, which is why quality is judged on the link itself rather than on any short-term movement.

A useful report lists each link with the page it sits on, the page it points to, the anchor text, whether it was paid for, how it is marked, and a short note on why it is relevant. Ask the company to send that list rather than a count and an average score, so you can open the links and judge them yourself.

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